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When living fully & creatively drags up your ‘stuff’

Living fully and creatively can drag up ‘stuff’, sometimes unexpected, painful, difficult ‘stuff’.

It requires courage, and the ability to parent yourself – oh, and patience, lots of patience.

It’s still totally worth it .

Turn up the volume and don’t miss a moment of your precious life!

I posted it this status update in the middle of a week of ‘stuff’. I’m making lots of art at the moment (yay!) but it does open up channels which let weird things through – feelings, memories…

These surface as poems, artworks, odd dreams and (in the case of this week) a feeling of hyper-sensitivity, like I can’t stand too many people talking, or too much going on, at once.

Turning up the gain, turning up the volume, it can make things seem LOUD and TOO MUCH sometimes, you know?

So, I headed to the sea and breathed in lots of salty air. I may need to do a lot more of this in the next few months.

It’s my theory that many people back away from creative living precisely because it sometimes all seems like too much.

Too much of the feeling, thinking, seeing.

To a sensitive person (that would be pretty much everyone who isn’t a sociopath!) this can create overwhelm.

So, in the middle of this feeling, what do I do?

* Be gentle with myself. Seriously, it’s OK to feel like this – I just keep telling myself.

* Take time alone: essential for working through stuff. Get the journal out, lock the door or head to the woods, is my method.

* Laying off the over-analysing: my logical brain tries to step in on all this feeling and give it a name, control it, label it and pack it away in a neat container. That’s not how it works. Some things have to be given space to sort themselves out, without too much control.

* Communicating with the other humans in my life. Just saying ‘I’m a little overwhelmed right now’ can stop people around you feeling like they’ve done something wrong, or that the fact that you are heading for the woods or locking yourself in your studio is their fault or responsibility.

Most of all, I just let this be – if arting and reading and being in nature brings up stuff, I trust that it’s stuff that needs to come to the surface, that it’s not a negative thing, and just hold the space for it to happen.